is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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Amherst gets ROCKED. Finally. But it's really only Northampton.

Amherst gets ROCKED. Finally. But it's really only Northampton.

It is fully spring now. Compare and contrast:

On Saturday night, Chris� friend Butch Walker was in town to play at the Iron Horse in Northampton, so I had dinner with them, and then went to the show, and then hung out on the tour bus very late into the morning as we (and especially they) sat around enthusiastically deciding which excellent song in the history of good rock and pop songs would play next on Butch�s iTunes. I witnessed untold amounts of air guitar and air drumming. But we are all roughly the same age and of the same sector of our age-group, so at least we tended to agree on what songs are EXCELLENT. So that night was an Amherst first and last�I stayed out until 4 in the morning. By the way, look how cute Butch Walker is! Damn! (Better yet, go to his home page, click on video, then click on mixtape, and watch him be a cute stalker in video format.)

And�. People LOOOOVE him. The place was FULL of young kids singing along to every song and jumping up and down and hugging each other and drunkenly suggesting what song to play next. In fact sometimes they would drunkenly suggest what song to play next during a quiet moment in whatever song was currently being played, and sometimes they sang along very loudly and off key during songs, and apparently that was hard for Butch, as he was playing acoustic so he could hear it all. But I was up in the balcony away from all that so all I saw and heard was the enthusiastic fandom and cute Butch singing his songs.

The opening band was called The Low Millions (good name, music so-so), and their lead singer is Leonard Cohen�s son. Chris said he could hear it in the guy�s throat. I took his word on that, not knowing how to listen to a throat. Chris then made up impromptu words to whatever song the band happened to be singing at the moment, my favorite re-write being the one called �Hairy Muscles.� For me the most memorable thing about the band is that they were all wearing some sort of neck-scarf thing. Not necessarily in a good way.

Northampton law allows liquor to be served until two, but only if you are already safely inside a bar at 1am. If you are not, you are out of luck. We arrived at a bar at 1:05 post-show, and I assumed we�d be OK because I was with two rock stars, one of whom knows the owner of the bar in question. But unfortunately Butch inspired a bit of a Pied Piper thing, so that by the time the five of us who were planning to hang out arrived at the bar, there were like twenty-five of us. So there was no allowance into the bar, no, none at all. Butch decided we could go back to his tour bus and then allow his tour manager to say goodnight to the followers. But Butch is very nice so he himself spent quite a bit of time outside the tour bus talking to his fans while we luxuriated inside.

At some point the tour manager let some young girls into the bus, and then the whole scene became weird, because nothing changed, except now the small group of music-geek people who were listening to songs on Butch�s computer were being watched while doing so. All the men on the bus were married. Nothing happened. But the scene reminded me that some things never change. There will always be girls who really really want to get with a musician, and who will sit on a tour bus for hours while being slightly excluded from all interaction, in the hopes that something will shift somehow. And, well, often things do shift. I�ve spent a fair amount of time on the tour busses of friends, so I have observed the scene myriad times. And so, given that I have spent a fair amount of time on tour busses, you might now be asking, how is it that I escape being placed in the category in which I�ve just placed these young girls? I guess if I do escape it, it is only because I only find myself on tour buses with people I already know.

At one point one of the girls who tried talking to Chris asked him whether he is insane (there are many, many reasons why someone talking to Chris might ask that). He told her to ask me. I said, �He is not insane; he just has an exceedingly evil wit.� It�s true. If you get his wit, you will, like me, believe that he is made of gold.

The next day there was still much packing to be done. Man, packing sucks! It is hurting me to think how much MORE packing will have to be done in order to move my stuff from SF to PA. Damn! But�. There is something so very liberating (for me) about having nothing to do (for a short time) EXCEPT packing. I just have to listen to music and put things in boxes and clean stuff up and throw stuff out. No reading, no editing, no grading, no lecture-writing. Man, it is a big RELIEF. So I�ve been drinking a lot of beer, too. Packing goes very well with beer. Especially a tasty Corona with lime, the beer of Girls.


4:02 p.m. - May 16, 2005

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